'Superman' Review: David Corenswet Soars but James Gunn's Movie Hits Rough Air

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In recent years Superman has become something of a nowhere man, a caped irrelevancy. You just know all the superheroes over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe make fun of him on their Slack channel.
Yet for decades he was a figure of glory, flying at the highest altitudes, fists clenched in strength, jaw and chin firmly set with the fortitude of a true champion of civil order. In the era known as the American Century, he symbolized the country's sense of exceptionalism, justice, optimism and might. (His alter ego, Clark Kent, was just as morally sound, if awkwardly virile — a point that Vladimir Nabokov addressed in a 1942 poem: 'I have to wear these glasses—otherwise / When I caress her from my super-eyes / Her lungs and liver are too plainly seen.')
Superman had his own radio show by 1940, and a feature movie, Superman and the Mole Men, as well as a TV series little more than a decade later. In both vehicles he was played by George Reeves, polite, bland and not noticeably muscled. But Metropolis in those days wasn't terribly violent. Superman's 'S' could have stood for 'security.'
With time, as America's sense of itself became more complex, Superman could be discussed analytically, abstractly or ironically without having his integrity questioned or compromised. Norman Mailer invoked him in his book about JFK, Superman Comes to the Supermarket. Charles Strouse and Lee Adams created a Broadway musical version (It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman!). Roy Lichtenstein turned him into a pop-art icon. But his apotheosis came with the 1978 blockbuster Superman: The Movie. The promotional campaign touted the slogan 'You will believe you can see a man fly' — well, no, not really. Not now, not ever. But you did believe in Christopher Reeve's charmingly diffident, classically beautiful Superman.
If it was good to be the king, it was better to be Superman.
Since then, though, Superman has been critically weakened, and not because of the green toxic glow of Kryptonite. In the still-expanding superhero action-movie universe, he's a stolid old moon eclipsed by bright, zippy asteroids. He's also languished in the inky shadow of mystery that director Christopher Nolan brought to D.C.'s other major superhero, Batman, starting with Batman Begins. Henry Cavill's Superman aimed for a similar muscled gravitas, but without much success. (If you wanted a 'dark' Superman, he can be found in Laurie Anderson's song 'O Superman,' which equates him with American nuclear capability.)
But now he comes again, our Superman, in his first film appearance since 2017's Justice League, and directed by James Gunn, whose restless visual style and irreverent humor practically created a Marvel subgenre out of the Guardians of the Galaxy films. You don't get the impression Gunn will waste any time trying to make Superman great again. The film isn't guided by the vaulted principles of truth, justice and the American way as much as it is by Hollywood's playbook of reboot and tentpole.
The result is a dizzyingly wild, wildly imperfect movie with one radical flash of inspiration — we'll get to that — and a refreshingly different Superman.
David Corenswet, best known for two Ryan Murphy series, The Politician and Hollywood, has a face that's handsome but short of chiseled superhero perfection, and his hair, dyed raven-black, to some degree doesn't work with his natural tone. He occasionally looks seasick. (He also tends to get banged up a lot, as if he'd been observing the Queensberry rules in a World Wrestling fight.) But his features are strong, attractively so, and they tend to settle into an expression that's friendly, uncomplicated (but not dumb) and open.
Shot in closeup as he soars through the sky, he's most likely thinking about how to quash nemesis Lex Luthor (a funny Nicholas Hoult, long, thin and round-headed as a Q-tip). But, for all you know, he might also be anticipating the lunch his robot staff will have prepared for him at the icy compound he calls home.
A Superman who can be imagined looking forward to a decent meal isn't a bad thing.
The movie barely deals with Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, whose hair appears to have been zhuzhed with some special gel that survived the exodus from Krypton. His life at The Daily Planet is sketched in lightly, perhaps too lightly, although Skyler Gisondo's Jimmy Olsen is buoyantly likable as he cultivates an underworld source, a romance-minded moll named Eve (Sara Sampaio, delightfully cartoonish).
Rachel Brosnahan's Lois Lane comes to life only fitfully, but in those moments Superman has flashes of genuine feeling. In one provocatively long scene, Lois, who knows Superman's secret identity, argues with Clark that Superman should let her interview him (Superman, of course, always gives Clark the exclusive scoop). Lois's professional pride, Clark/Superman's surprisingly prickly self-defensiveness and the couple's seesaw of friction and attraction are the closest a superhero movie will ever come to Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives.
You're also grateful for Gunn's willingness to indulge in silly, throwaway moments. Why, for instance, is there a shot of Clark's hands dropping two slices of bread into a toaster? I have no idea, but I laughed anyway. Gunn also takes a break from the action to show Superman sipping hot chocolate and quietly saying, 'Mmmm!'
These small, humanizing touches are more memorable than any of the world-threatening chaos being created by Lex Luthor.
But of course chaos is what drives the film. Luthor wants Superman hampered, injured or simply destroyed as he schemes to provoke a war overseas. This is just a lot of busyness. When the aggressor nation's military finally advances against the hapless opposition, you may find yourself wishing movie directors would stop throwing in toothless battle scenes. This one couldn't look less authentic if you filmed an army of parking valets stumbling around a desert, searching for car keys lost in the sand.
Before this rather dull international incident, Superman has journeyed into a pocket alternate universe where Luthor stashes and tortures anyone who's tried to thwart him. The prisoners are housed in an enormous complex of stacked glass cubes that could serve as an arena-sized production of Company. Alternate universes never bode well, though, and this one soon is collapsing into a black hole. Visually the whole sequence is a mess, a surging digital spray of color. It's as if someone had thrown handfuls of costume jewelry into a wood chipper.
Gunn also finds time to introduce Krypto, Superman's (CGI-rendered) dog. Krypto is cute and boundingly energetic, always eager to play and, as the movie goes on, a bit tiresome. It wouldn't do him any harm to spend a day with a mythic dog whisperer, possibly in the company of Cerberus and the Hound of the Baskervilles.
This bring us, at last, to that radical tweak I mentioned earlier — a tweak that has the potential to upend a sizable chunk of the Superman legend. (That's assuming Gunn takes it seriously. Maybe he doesn't.) I don't intend to spoil it here, but it has to do with the high-minded moral instructions that little Kal-El, the future Superman, received from his now-dead parents. It turns out that their full message, spelled out in a hologram of papa Jor-El (played by an unexpected A-lister), was until now garbled because of a technical glitch.The message isn't nearly as lofty or empowering as Superman might have wished. Even on Krypton, it seems, the Philip Larkin line applies: 'They f--- you up, your mum and dad.'
Superman is in theaters July 11.
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